St. Luke's unveils Allentown expansion

Addition more than doubles size, better equips hospital.

September 18, 2008|By Veronica Torrejon OF THE MORNING CALL

As she wandered the emergency department during Wednesday's grand opening of the $75 million expansion of St. Luke's Hospital-Allentown, Nurse Manager Faith Ring thought back several decades earlier when the facility was little more than two joined mansions with a hospital facade.

It was Allentown Osteopathic Medical Center then, before it was purchased by St. Luke's Hospital and Health Network in 1997 and before a series of expansions that culminated Wednesday in the unveiling of the 213,000-square-foot expansion. The latest addition, which took less than two years to complete, more than doubles the size of the campus at 17th and Hamilton streets.

"A lot of people didn't really know we were here until five years ago," said Ring, who will help oversee the new emergency department, which will see its first patients starting at 7 a.m. Monday.

It was five years ago, in June 2003, that the hospital completed a $50 million five-story addition that included a 10,000-square-foot emergency department expansion, five new operating rooms and a 10-bed intensive care unit.

Years ago, Ring said, emergency staff there could only stabilize seriously ill patients and transport them to a larger hospital. Now doubled in size, the emergency department is equipped to handle 60,000 patients annually, including those having a heart attack or stroke.

The expansion also includes six new intensive care beds, 22 surgical beds, two cardiac catheterization laboratories and a 680-square-foot open heart operating room suite with modern interactive teleconferencing equipment that allow surgeons to teach remotely from the operating room.

St. Luke's President Richard Anderson would call it "inventing the future of health care." He told the more than 500 present that the expansion will help the hospital keep pace with a population explosion in the Lehigh Valley.